Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the publishers, asked us to help them engage with the Internet.

Today, we launched what we’re calling (toot toot!) the first networked book.

It’s Pulse, by Robert Frenay, and it’s available at http://www.pulsethebook.com.

This was a fascinating project to launch, and it will be interesting to see what kind of response we get.

Here’s what we did and why:

• Serialized the full text of the book. Twice a day at 6 am and 3 pm on weekdays, once a day at noon on weekends (Central Time — that’s where our server lives.) From April 10 to November 6, 2006.

  We’re also introducing (tomorrow) a time-delay feed, also known as a serial feed, a service provided by FeedHoster. We wanted to solve the problem of people showing up in the months to come having already missed much of the book. The serialized feeds solves this problem!

  Why get listed in a secondary index when you can be indexed in the primary search results page? Google has been pressuring publishers to make their books available through the Google Books program, arguing (basically) that they’ll get more play if people can search them. Fine, except Google may be getting the play. If you’re producing the content, better do it yourself (before someone else does it).

  Making the whole book available gets rid of the suspicion people will have that we’re just teasing them to get them to buy. Our bet is that by being open people will buy the book because it is fascinating. Give before you get.

  The posts are available at regular intervals because we hope they will become a companion to morning and afternoon “downtime”.

• Linked out from the text, so readers can find out what other people are doing and saying. We want to encourage the link love. Using our linkology methodology, we’re adding interesting, relevant links to the people and ideas Mr. Frenay is talking about. We’re betting some of them will link back to us.
• Opened up the text so that the ideas in it are easy to find. We put together annotated directories of people, blogs, forums, carnivals, publications, organizations, and books, all with links.
• Made it easy to respond.. The book talks extensively about how feedback is the essence of how nature works, and we think it will work here. Comments of course, but also a place to make factual corrections, and add to our directories.
• Encouraged other venues. We didn’t put together forums because we weren’t trying to establish a community on this site. Those communities already exist. The conversation is happening all over the Net, where it belongs.

Personally I really loved putting this together, because it touches directly on some abiding interests:

• We got to explode notions of how things should be read. You can’t replicate the experience of laying back on a pile of pillows with a real book. But when the text is linked, when the text is tagged, when the text is searchable, when the text is approachable in so many ways, that’s quite an experience too. Each has its place. There’s no reason that Robert Frenay’s ideas should be limited to a particular form.
• We were able to get into the fascinating interface between traditional publishing and the web. It’s an area of extreme interest — culturally it touches on the future of an art form (that would be literature…). Commercially, it’s where far-reaching change is happening fast. The commercial response to this book will, I think, be seen as a test case. That’s why we did our best to put together a good site.
• We got to respond to the text. I like to read, and I’m always wanting to call up the author and give him or her my thoughts. Each of the people linking the text made the decisions about where to link, and why. We all follow our linkology methods, but we added our own layer of readership onto the text. Very gratifying.
• RSS is cool!

There are precedents to what we’re doing, but nothing until now has made the text itself interactive.

I’ll keep blogging about the challenges we run into, how we solve them (if we can), and what technologies we’d like to see to make this kind of effort more effective.

Could we have (or should we have) done it differently? Does anyone know how we should improve the site or the feeds? Or what content we should add? Or what we could do with other technology?

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, Media + Marketing, News